Checking Out Veeam Business View
In July, Veeam introduced a new free tool called
Veeam Business View. Business View does, well, just that. It represents the infrastructure in organizational ways that you decide that makes sense for your business. In our tech-heavy world of aggregated infrastructure and platform architecture, it makes sense to see it in a way that the rest of the organization can find useful.
Business View natively plugs in to vCenter Server (vSphere and VMware Infrastructure 3) to inventory your virtualized environment. Key features of Veeam Business View include the ability to work with three categorization elements: Business Unit, Department and Purpose. Within these categories, there can be many different items for each level. These are then used among other things to apply rules that match the infrastructure to friendly organization elements. Additional custom attributes can be applied to this "meta-information" that may make sense for certain installations. Additionally, there are approval mechanisms and export functionality as part of the product.
I am the cheapest virtualization person I know, so that means that I am a sucker for the free tools. I just started tinkering with it, and you may want to do the same. The main point that I want to explore here is building an organization of your virtualized environment without being required to follow the host, cluster and resource pool infrastructure that defines the technology. Business View is currently free and integrates with other Veeam and nworks products with more planned as it matures.
Have you been using Business View? Share a comment below on your experiences.
Posted by Rick Vanover on 09/28/2009 at 12:47 PM